The 1997 film that inadvertently gave Jason Statham a career: “We have to create our own movie stars”
Can you imagine a world without Jason Statham movies?
What a terribly bleak place that would be. No circa-2010 copies of The Expendables on DVD that you find in a box while moving house. No old Guy Ritchie efforts with Brad Pitt doing a poor Irish accent. No one-off comedies with Melissa McCarthy that leave you thinking, ‘Hang on, what the hell happened to her?’
Well, that horrendous reality could well have existed had it not been for a 1990s sci-fi classic featuring a similarly shaven-headed action star, as we’ll discover. It was all down to the fact that Bruce Willis, who in many ways was a kind of proto-Statham in the ‘80s and ‘90s, only with an American accent and more cigar smoking, could be a pretty tricky customer on a film set.
He was working on Luc Besson’s futuristic action movie The Fifth Element back in 1997, and to say the pair had differing points of view on how a film should be put together is an understatement… To start with, Besson had wanted Mel Gibson for the lead role of 23rd Century cab driver Korben Dallas, but he had passed on the film, leaving Willis as the second choice – it was a big deal for Besson, who had been working on the screenplay for The Fifth Element since he was 16 years old and already had Gary Oldman on board.
So, Willis it was, but the budget for the movie was spiralling, and even before filming began, there were issues. Willis’ assistant came to Besson with a list of demands of what Willis would and wouldn’t do, including the fact that he didn’t like waiting around between takes.
Although Besson assuaged him with a four-day work week, the actor told Entertainment Weekly, “We had long days, and we’d just have to work and work and keep it moving quickly. Luc does a lot of takes. But that’s part of the film business, and I didn’t have any problem with it.”
But the movie’s co-writer, Robert Kamen, recalls a completely different atmosphere, and a frustration from the director that inadvertently created an action hero for the decade to follow. Kamen said, “[Bruce] was very difficult, and Luc worked around it. But (he) wasn’t used to it. After he did that, he came to me and said, ‘We have to create our own movie stars.’ And that’s what we did with (2002 action thriller) The Transporter. We created Jason [Statham].”
Now… let’s be fair to Statham here, because it’s not like he was plucked from a market stall or won a competition and was suddenly playing the lead role in a $20million franchise movie. He had made several films before Besson tapped him up for The Transporter, including Guy Ritchie’s Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars and Jet Li’s The One, so he was no stranger to smashing people in the face on camera.
But certainly it was The Transporter that catapulted him into the category of leading action star. As the former Special Ops soldier Frank Martin, Statham excelled under the nimble hand of Besson’s direction and the film doubled its budget, spawning a sequel in 2005 and a third instalment in 2008.
Altogether, the trilogy brought in almost $250m at the box office, and Statham became the star of annual action movies with mundane jobs in the titles, and it’s all thanks to Bruce Willis being a bit of a diva.
